Travis knew that the return of the old Caitlyn couldn’t last long, but he had been hoping it would last longer than it did.

“You let me go out last night,” Caitlyn whined, her hands bunched on her hips.

“I was with you.”

“We’re just hanging out at Layla’s house. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Travis sighed, wishing for anything that he didn’t care. Because not having this argument every single day, not having to deal with the yelling and the whining, was suddenly his latest version of bliss. “I’m responsible for you and I don’t feel comfortable letting you go over to Layla’s house without her parents there.”

“God, I can’t wait until you stop pretending to be Mom and turn back into my brother. Or are you just going to try to fill her shoes for the rest of your life? You can’t even bring yourself to change a single thing about this house. It’s your house now, not some shrine to a dead woman.”

Caitlyn stormed to her room and slammed the door, leaving Travis alone to pick his jaw up off the floor in her wake. Mr. Wigglesworth whined outside her door, but she didn’t let him in. Instead, the scent that Travis hadn’t smelled in weeks wafted from under the doorway, and Mr. Wigglesworth scampered back into the living room in search of fresh air. Travis joined him on the floral-patterned couch.

He had kept the house the same out of respect for Caitlyn, because he didn’t want even more upheaval in her life. He knew she missed their mother, they both did. Obviously keeping everything the same to make her feel stable and secure backfired, but the fact that she saw it as a sign that Travis couldn’t move on?

He displaced Mr. Wigglesworth temporarily as he swung his legs onto the couch and leaned back with his head on the armrest. How many times had he complained about this very couch? It was ugly. It was uncomfortable. It was pink and blue and reminiscent of something you’d find in a vacation home in Florida that was owned by an eighty-year-old woman. But now the thought of getting rid of it had his stomach in knots.

Travis knew that soon, he was going to have to clear things out. He hadn’t touched a thing in his mother’s bedroom. Her toothbrush still lay across any empty soap dish, waiting to be used again. The towel and washcloth from her last shower still hung in her bathroom. Her pajamas still piled at the foot of her unmade bed.

Caitlyn was right, but she was also wrong. The house was a shrine, but it wasn’t because Travis was trying to slide into his mother’s unfillable shoes. It was because he was scared shitless. Because the second he started to change things, to get rid of things, to make this house his own, it meant his mother was really gone and never coming back.

Travis grabbed a blanket off the other end of the sofa, where it had always resided, and covered himself and Mr. Wigglesworth, who had squished himself in-between Travis’s body and the back of the couch. He no longer set the alarms to check on Caitlyn. It had been a month now, and although she was clearly still working through things, the immediate danger seemed to have passed.

And Travis needed the sleep.

“Do you have any books on garage sales?”

“Garage sales?” Whitman’s brain took a second to catch up from where it had gotten stuck on Travis’ warm skin leaning on the desk.

“Yeah, I need to plan one, and I have no idea where to start.”

“Hmm,” Whitman chewed on the tip of a pen as he typed one-handed. “Let’s see.”

A few possibilities popped up, and Whitman took note of their call numbers with the chewed pen, before setting off through the stacks. He could feel Travis follow behind him and tried not to smile.

“My mom was a yard sale queen,” Whitman said as he scanned the shelves, quickly passing sections until he got to the right one. “If you need any help, I’d be more than happy to give you a hand.”

He pulled out three books and handed them over to Travis, then scanned the cover of one, pulling back. “This one is assuming you want to start a regularly running yard sale, but you’re just looking to hold the one, right?”

When Travis agreed, Whitman reshelved the book.

“Flip through them, and if either of these appear to be of use, bring them up and you can check them out.”

“Umm, I don’t actually have a library card.”

Whitman clutched his chest, but when Travis rushed to his side, Whitman straightened up and patted his arm.

“I’m kidding. Your lack of affinity for the library offends me, but it does not wound me.”

Still shocked, Travis mumbled an apology that had Whitman wishing he could curl up with Travis and read every good book to him until he was a converted library believer. That soft dark hair against his cheek. Warm skin that felt and smelled like it had soaked up the outdoors, not that Whitman specifically sniffed Travis, but sometimes he stood so close it was unavoidable. Or that his own skin had come into contact with Travis’. But Whitman did have a vivid imagination.

“Sit. Read. If you like either of them, I’ll check them out for you. I don’t do that for just anyone, you know. It’s my name on the line with the library gods if something happens to the book.” Whitman winked and rushed back to the front desk before he could say, or do, anything else so ridiculous.

Caitlyn emerged from cleaning the teen room and was surprised to see her brother tucked into a corner, reading. She was even more surprised when Whitman mentioned what kind of book Travis had been looking for.

“Huh,” she said, then deposited the spray cleaner and rag in the cleaning closet and returned with the air spray for the keyboards. Whitman watched her through the window. She sprayed each keyboard but seemed distracted as she did it, and Whitman was so distracted watching her, that when a book landed on the counter in front of him, he jumped.

He laughed at himself before taking in the book’s title. “Find what you were looking for?” he asked with a smile.

“I think so. It looks like a lot of work, though,” Travis said, like hosting a yard sale was only mildly preferable to being eaten by sharks or wading through hot lava. Not the fun and stimulating project that Whitman had found his mother’s yard sales to be.

“It’s all in the organization. Do you already have everything together that you want to sell?”

Travis huffed out a sound that tried to be a laugh but couldn’t quite make it. “It’s going to be all of my mom’s old things. I can’t even make it past her doorway though. I don’t know how I’m going to collect everything I need for a yard sale when I can’t bring myself to walk into her room.”

“Do you have to do it right away? Maybe you shouldn’t push yourself.” Whitman desperately wanted to reach out and clasp Travis’s hand, to share what little strength he had with the man, but he was working and that would be wildly inappropriate anyway.

“I think it would help Caitlyn. She said something earlier that made me think that I had it all wrong, keeping things the same as Mom had them. So yeah.”

“Feel free to tell me to mind my own business if you want, but I could help. If going into the room is that hard for you, I could bring things out? Help you sort through everything. Maybe having a stranger there would help keep your mind off things.”

Travis managed a tiny crook of his lips. “You’re hardly a stranger.”

Whitman tried, he really did, not to glow at the words. But the idea that he had made an actual friend, his first here in town, made him almost giddy.

“Then it’s settled. Because having a friend help you out is an even better distraction than a stranger. Or so I hear. Just name the time and place.”

Travis nodded and took the book that Whitman had scanned using his own library card.

“Thanks,” he said and left clutching the book to his chest.